life, the universe, and everything (although not always in that order)

Saturday, November 04, 2006

FC6 successful upgrade: rhea

When I failed to upgrade my home system europa to FC6, I went back and installed Suse 10.1, and then installed all the patches. That was 24 hours ago. Earlier today I threw the same DVD at rhea, my 'lesser' system. I say lesser because it's a DYI system built with a low-end nVidia nForce2-based motherboard with an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton-core processor, 512MB of DRAM, and a budget ATI 9600 video card with 128MB of video memory. It drives an old Sony 19" E400 tube monitor. Before the upgrade it was running Suse 10.

FC6 installed without a hitch. Not one single problem reared its pointed head. Now that I've had a chance to play with it I'm going to put it on my other 'lesser' system, tethys, and see how tethys behaves. Tethys has only 384 MB of DRAM, but it currently dual boots Windows XP Pro and Suse 10. I put Suse on that machine so that the girls could get used to Linux. Besides, Linux rips the latest CDs regardless of the funky ways the music industry creates the CD file system. The girls like that, especially when they can copy their CD songs to their players without hassle.

Here's some FC6 eye candy.

After the install, I got a message that I needed to install 47 updates to everything I installed. That too went without any problems.

Here I've fired up a few quick applications; Firefox 1.5.0.7, a few terminals, glxgears, and KDevelop C/C++. I tweaked the terminal to set the background (partially transparent) and font for my tastes. You'll note that even with software updates going on one desktop and these little applications running here, that I've barely touched swap (192K). Response and performance were still quite nice on this 'old' system.

Of particular interest is how USB behaves on this old system. So I grabbed my 1GB USB thumb drive and plugged it in. It was detected and I was able to use it without any problems.

As is usual, I have to learn the peculiarities of Nautilus all over again. The view in the background is the view you get if you click on the desktop links to file systems. The view in the front is what you get if you open one of the folders from the view in the back. It turns out that the front view is what I want, not the back view. So now I have to go hunt down how to make the front view my default view when I open Nautilus. This isn't an FC6 issue. It's a bloody Gnome issue. Why the hell can't the Gnome/Nautilus developers leave the default view well enough alone? I'm up for a clone of the Mac OS X file explorer anyway.